


Out to Sea

by Anonymous



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alcohol, Child Neglect, Gen, University, fun awful family dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:40:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27658291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: University is a turning point for the Lukases.
Relationships: Evan Lukas & Peter Lukas, Judith Lukas & Aaron Lukas
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16
Collections: Anonymous





	Out to Sea

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how the timelines match up but wouldn't it be wild if Evan and Danny Stoker knew each other in college? That's not necessarily true in this fic, I just think it'd be wild.

Judith and Aaron went to the same university. They sat just far enough apart on the ride there. Just far enough to stay unscolded, hands tucked in their laps in severe silence.

Aaron was scared. Obviously, he was scared. In many ways he felt like he and Judith were the last two left- despite that they were clearly not. It had been obvious since he was born that Peter would be the last one standing of their little Lukas clan, that every other one of them was deeply inferior in some way they couldn’t figure out. Still. Peter had been gone, as of late, ducking in and out of the house at odd hours, sleeplessness worn like bruises under his eyes.

Something in Aaron considered him good as dead. Thus, him and Judith.

Judith was angry. Not at anything in particular, just in a way that she had been angry for a long time now. Absently, mindlessly, driven not towards anything, but rather, away. Away from her family, save her siblings. Aaron, mostly. He still believed that the twins were alive somewhere, taken care of by distant relatives like mother had said. But Judith is quiet, she listens, and she knows they aren’t. Peter, she cares about in her own way. She wants him to come with them when he’s old enough- because she has no intention of going back- but knows he won’t. She’s got to cut her losses.

They make contact once in the ride, when Judith grabs Aaron’s hand and squeezes tight for one moment. Their hands are back in their laps in the next, Judith’s clenched in anger and Aaron’s in fear.

They get dorms across campus from each other, alone, but they sprawl on each other’s couches often enough. “Do we have to go home for the summer?” Aaron laments. He’s so whiny now that it doesn’t get him punished. She finds it as annoying as she does relieving. He’s a person, a bitchy older brother, not a hollowed out Lukas shell.

Books on child psychology and cults and abuse line her shelves. She’d had her speculation, she’d done her research. “I don’t think we should go home at all.”

-

Conrad’s ride to university was alone.

Well.

It wasn’t alone. He was on the train, surrounded by people packed in like sardines. It was the least lonely he’d felt in years, surrounded by people who knew nothing about him. He squinted at the map and resolved to get himself glasses while he was away.

Conrad had a roommate. Richard was loud and obnoxious and came home drunk at inconvenient hours, and it was an irritating exercise in living with someone- an exercise that Conrad hadn’t had in his sprawling house full of relatives. His only sister’s screams were silenced years ago.

He’d thought they’d killed her, until he found her in the shadows of the mist, sobbing. He left her there to die. He thought it was probably for the best.

Conrad lined his shelves with books on the occult. Richard, a fellow physics major, snorted, but Conrad shut out his snubbing. He read from fog to fear to the permeating sense of forsaken to the list of Smirke’s fourteen, and it made sense. Perfect sense.

At first he dedicated himself to leaving it behind. He went out with Richard, let his books collect dust, he dated and fucked and found out. It was exhausting, it was new, it was terrifying in a different way than the dull horror of his childhood. He persisted.

It was, in the end, finances that brought him back. Conrad looked into future planning and career prospects and, for the first time, really considered what cutting himself from the family would be like. Considered what staying in the family would require, and what it would give him. Considered the first eighteen years of his life spent quiet and miserable and wondering.

He decided he could handle quiet and miserable, now that the wondering was done. When he went home for winter vacation that year, he faced his father head on and asks what he needed to do to get initiated to The Lonely. The shock on the man’s face- faint, undetectable to anyone but Conrad, who had spent so many years searching it for affection- was vindication enough to last him years.

He returned for the next semester a farce of a man. Broke things off with his girlfriend in stilted words, like he’d forgotten how to speak. Moved out and to a single dorm. Sat in the fog that collected in his new room, surrounded by books and drink, the cold dread seeping its way back into his heart despite the burn in his throat.

And he felt fine. Numbed, down to his core. As long as it stayed like that, he could resign his life to this.

-

Evan rode up to university with Peter. He expected some sort of- not a lecture. Their family didn’t give lectures. Only implications and half-sentences that lanced you through with hurt. He expected at least some sort of glance, knowing and disappointed, to tell him to behave. To tell him not to go and talk and befriend like he had always been so prone to.

All Peter did was clap him on the shoulder and give a few parting words. A few pleasantries, goodbyes, so normal that Evan was left reeling. A new city, a new home, all- well. Alone.

His roommate was a shorter man named Daniel, who bemoaned Evan’s height. Evan laughed, awkward, like he didn’t know quite how to do it. Evan had laughed, admitting he was something of a runt compared to the rest of the Lukases. Daniel looked at him like he’d grown two heads. How tall is the rest of your family, he’d asked. It was the beginning of a long line of questions about the Lukas family.

Two weeks in he’d learned to shut up about them. It only got him sharp, concerned looks. Instead he researched in the library- feeling rather stupid- how to try to interact like a normal person. He fell in with social rejects and found his footing.

By the time he’d graduated he’d been completely self sufficient without so much as a letter. The payments from his family, unsettling looming reminders, didn’t even stop until he had a stable job and a girlfriend at his side.

It was absolutely insane to him. Eighteen years of things that he’d had to discover were horrific abuses and they’d just let him go. Without a word. Without a confrontation.

It doesn’t feel real, some days. Those days, he buries his face in Naomi’s shoulder and breathes her in.

-

Peter didn’t go to university. He’d asked why it was necessary, when they told him to start thinking about it- feeling bratty and anxious to get out of the house for a few nights, thinking more about his mother’s purse abandoned on the dining table than anything else. His uncle's face showed consideration, and he’d left without another word. Peter didn’t mind, barely noticed. Conversation was another worry he didn’t want.

He disappeared for two weeks, that time, and disappeared into the mist after that so that his siblings' concerned chatter couldn’t reach his ears. The Lonely, they’d explained to him, he possessed a talent for. It was pleasingly special to know he alone could drift into the fog with the ease he did, that he could evade anything he wanted by just sitting alone. It hurt deep in his chest, shook something with terror, but he relished it. It was part of what made him special.

They had to fetch him from where he’d laid in the fog for god knows how long, and explained patiently that he would not be going to university. Instead, they said, he’d been offered an apprenticeship on a boat.

The apprenticeship was probably the worst year of his life. He spent much of it in the fog, avoiding the loud, overloading noise of the packed ship. Staying in The Lonely too long ached, made him numb and miserable, but those feelings were familiar and grew only more so by the day. Outside of it he considered to be worse, ear-shattering and nauseating and expectant, making his head ring and his breath come in gasping heaves.

Eventually, the fog spilled from his coat to his quarters to the rest of the ship, unfurling in thick plumes.

The crew went quiet.

Not gone, though. They stayed, did their jobs. Just quiet. Afraid. Peter learned and feasted and his family sent him right back out once he returned to port.


End file.
